


Watersteel

by thedevilchicken



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Cunnilingus, Empress Padmé Amidala, F/M, Flirting, Loyalty, Masturbation, Sith Empire, Sith Obi-Wan Kenobi, Sith Padmé Amidala, Sparring, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:41:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23954746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: They always knew that one day she'd be their empress.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 7
Kudos: 102
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	Watersteel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadaras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/gifts).



They always knew that one day she'd be their empress.

She's lived in the temple since she was four years old. They arrived at the same time, though on different transports from very different places; he saw her across the spaceport outside the temple gates that morning, a tiny wisp of nothing in a long black cloak that even then she didn't trip on. He tripped on his and stumbled as he came down the transport's loading ramp, mostly because he'd been soaked to the skin in the icy Coruscant rain roughly six seconds after the doors had opened and the hem of his new Sith cloak clung to his old arena boots. She, on the other hand, was under a huge, shining canopy that sprawled like a plasma shield fit for a rancor above her and her whole party. They stayed dry. He did not.

He didn't know who she was but that canopy told him all he needed to know, he thought: the Sith had ranks and classes, too, like ordinary people did back on his homeworld. He'd clawed his way up once, he thought, and he'd do it again. He has. 

Nine days ago, Emperor Palpatine died and Empress Amidala took his place. Two days ago was her official coronation. Now, Obi-Wan waits in the throne room, deep inside the temple where no outside light can penetrate. There's a well there, unassuming, just a space in the floor where instead of stone there's still black water. At her coronation, they dipped a cup in and she drank from it like all their other rulers have for a thousand years or more before her. He wonders if it changed her, or if she just felt sick. 

Empress Padmé Amidala is twenty-six years old. She was raised to rule. He was raised to serve. He's ready to serve _her_.

But, as he waits, pacing by the well in the throne room floor, he doesn't know if she'll kill him or reward him. 

\---

Obi-Wan remembers the day they met. 

He doesn't mean the spaceport in the rain, or the day they were formally introduced, though he remembers both of those things quite distinctly. He remembers the Sith pilot pulling up his hood against the rain as they hurried inside and telling him, "That's Palpatine's new heir. We'll all bow to her one day." And he remembers the day he was confirmed as Master, when Palpatine was offworld and so she did the job instead. She was twenty-one years old that day, and strikingly beautiful even with her face painted formal white. 

"Lady Padmé," the Master of Ceremonies said. "We submit Sith Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi as candidate for Master." 

She didn't rise. She sat on Palpatine's throne, arms spread and hands resting one on each of the throne's elaborately carved black stone arms, and she made the faintest signal with her fingers for the Master of Ceremonies to withdraw. He did so - the words they'd say were traditionally for the two of them alone to hear - and she waved Obi-Wan forward toward her. 

He remembers kneeling on the ground at her feet, in front of the throne, where he'd knelt before Palpatine the day he'd been confirmed a Knight. He remembers how different it felt when she stretched out her hand and tilted up his chin with the tips of her first two fingers, and how different he felt when she said, "Tell me why you deserve this." 

He told her, and he'd had a script prepared of all the things he'd done that made him worthy of promotion, that he'd prepared sitting at a table in the archives and in his head in bed at night, and in the wind out on his balcony, but he went off-script. What he said was, "Because I'm loyal to you, my lady." He meant it with all possible sincerity, with all possible parts of himself, and he said nothing more.

There was white paint in his beard when he left the throne room and he could almost still feel the warmth of her skin. In his own room, at the very top of the temple proper, he looked at it in his mirror and felt his heart race in his chest. She'd rung the bell and called back the Master of Ceremonies. "We introduce Sith Master Obi-Wan Kenobi," she'd said, with her eyes still on him. She hadn't smiled, but her eyes said she was pleased, and he leaned his forehead down against the mirror as he thought about it. He closed his eyes and slipped one hand into his robes. His gasping breath fogged the glass and he came not long after, still thinking about her. 

But that's not the day they met. 

Obi-Wan's yearmates had teased him since his arrival about the room that he'd been allocated, tucked up under the temple eaves where no one went if they could help it. The better rooms were all much lower down - there were fewer stairs to climb, for a start, and they had better facilities, more recent renovations, and finding their way to the training hall for saber practice or their masters' classrooms for tutorials didn't take twenty minutes of negotiating lengthy stairwells and labyrinthine corridors that all looked very much the same as one another. The lower rooms were all closer together, too, in neat rows of identical doors with nameplates on them, but Obi-Wan was aware that even had his room been with the others, he wouldn't have been included; they'd all been in the temple since their early childhoods, just like Lady Padmé had. Obi-Wan had arrived much later. 

He'd been meant to move when a lower room came free, probably by virtue of its former occupant's death, but by then he'd been used to it. The hundreds-of-years-old master who'd left that room vacant had also left all of his possessions in it and over the years Obi-Wan has found himself wearing the old clothes because, he thinks, the classics never go out of style, and they must have been almost exactly the same size as one another. He remembers walking in that first time to find he had more than twice the space of the lower rooms, too, even considering the inconveniently-placed ceiling beams he had to duck, and there was a door that led out onto a balcony that none of the other rooms had. It's so high up that the wind whips his face and sometimes takes his breath away, but he likes it, so he's never moved. 

From the balcony, he can see the palace towers. The two buildings are butted up one against the other and joined by a small number of internal connecting corridors, but the palace is functionally separate from the temple; official functions are held there, but the initiates have no right of free access. But he can see her tower, where she lives with her handmaidens. He saw her there sometimes, as the years went by - her tower rooms had a row of tall, narrow windows in the stone and sometimes he'd see her wander by them. 

She grew taller year by year, and her hair grew longer, and sometimes he'd wonder what life was like in the palace instead of in the temple. In the beginning, he wondered if her training was like his or if they were gentler with her, though he understood that his own training was intensive because he'd missed so much. As Master Dooku had been the one who'd brought him there at such a relatively advanced age for a new initiate, Master Dooku had been put in charge of his remedial instruction, and Obi-Wan had not found him an easy man to please. He didn't mind it, though - training for the arena had been almost as hard. He just regretted that there weren't more hours in a standard day so he could fit in just a little more practice. 

Years passed. The other apprentices didn't travel far from the temple but Obi-Wan did, by special dispensation; he went with Master Dooku or Master Jinn so they could continue his lessons at the required pace. He was knighted soon enough, and he started taking missions of his own, on his own, but he kept the room - other Sith found him eccentric for it, but he didn't mind being seen that way. After all, they were all in competition; they were taught from the start that friends were never to be trusted, because no one was. 

Her balcony was bigger than his by at least three times the length from end to end and ten times the depth from wall to door, really more of a terrace where sometimes in the summer she took her meals. And, one night past sunset when the sky was as dark as it ever was on Coruscant, he stepped out onto his balcony and saw her there on hers. She was up on the balcony's relatively narrow wall, barefoot, in thin training clothes, practicing her gymnastics. She didn't seem scared of the potential fall at all. 

He watched her. She was elegant. There were some flaws, though he supposed they were more like personal quirks to her style than anything else, and he wondered if they remained because her teachers were too cowed by her proximity to the emperor to correct her or if she retained them from a sense of stubbornness. His own form was flawless by then, but he understood the urge to rebel. He'd always had to tamp it down, though he couldn't say he regretted doing so.

She was back there the next night and the next, and so was he. She was interesting to watch, not like the apprentices, not like the other knights, something different about her that he couldn't put his finger on except it was, perhaps, her surefootedness. That was until one night he saw her stumble on her landing, teeter ominously, and then fall. 

She was twenty years old. Old enough to be a knight - he'd been a knight himself by twenty, against all the odds given his late arrival - but Lady Padmé would never be a Sith Knight. Every year, they celebrated her birthday with games inside the temple. Planets throughout the galaxy sent her lavish gifts, as they did for the emperor's birthday, but the emperor's games were open and public and broadcast on the holonet while hers were more private, for the Sith alone, held in the temple's main hall. Palpatine had chosen her from all the people in the galaxy to be his heir; she wasn't just an arena brat from the arse-end of nowhere, like Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

He could have let her fall. He had no obligation to save her; she was the emperor's heir, not the emperor himself, and as such he had no duty toward her, at least not yet. But he used the Force to drag her toward him, through the air between their two balconies, and he caught her wrist and pulled her up. 

"You didn't have to do that," she told him. 

"No, I do realise I didn't." 

She frowned at him. She was somehow both smaller and taller than he'd expected, as if he had two concepts of her in his head: one from the spaceport years before and the other from his balcony, watching her there from a distance. It turned out that she was neither thing.

"No, I mean, I would have saved myself," she said. "You really didn't have to." 

"I'm sure that's true," he replied. 

"Who are you?" 

"My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"Do you know who I am?"

He gave her an exaggerated scraping bow. "Of course, my lady," he said, and when she frowned at him again, her nose wrinkled. 

"You can see my tower from here." 

"Yes, you can."

"Do you watch me?"

"Yes, I do."

"The emperor wouldn't like that."

"I very much doubt he would." 

"I could have you executed."

"Probably."

"Aren't you concerned?"

He dropped down to one knee. He looked up at her. She looked down at him, suddenly intrigued. 

"No, I'm not," he said. 

And she frowned yet again, and she looked at her tower, then she looked at his door. "How do I get back from here?" she asked. 

He shook his head. He took her inside. And once he'd lent her a cloak and she'd pulled the hood up to hide her face, he took her out of his room and into the corridors. When he ran, she ran. When he jumped, she jumped. He took three floors down in a single bound and she followed him, landed with a spring and laughed out loud, and the sound echoed in the tall, narrow stairwell. He knew the temple like the back of his hand and he took her through it in the way he went through it himself, along the corridors and down the winding stairs, into the cellars, to the foot of her tower. She kept pace with him, and when they came to the tower's one unguarded door, she smiled, she gave him back his cloak, and she slipped away. 

As he made his way back to his room, he found himself oddly glad that they'd met.

\---

The next night, when she stepped up onto the wall, she was naked. It was a surprise, he supposed, but not necessarily very much of one.

He could see how the night's usual chill to the air brought her nipples up to peaks, though she was still relatively far away. Wisps of long dark hair were blown free of her elaborate coiffure and tousled by the breeze around her face. And when she cartwheeled and somersaulted, she was confident, not knocked at all by the previous evening's fall. She didn't set one foot wrong, though she had to know he was watching. He rather suspected that was the point.

She straddled the wall and then pulled herself into a front split, eased into a side split, and all Obi-Wan could think about was her bare cunt against the smooth, cold stone as his mouth went dry and his heart beat faster in his chest. He wondered how it felt to her. He wondered if it made her wet, or if it was just a thing she did for show. And he felt himself begin to stiffen, but then she got up, she turned her back, and she went inside. 

When he came just a few minutes later, leaning forward against his balcony wall with his cock in his hand despite the chill, he was thinking about her. He really wished that hadn't been true, but facts were facts; like a fool, he was masturbating to the thought of the heir to the empire.

Her ridiculous naked gymnastics continued night by night, whenever she was there on Coruscant and not performing some ambassadorial visit to some Force-forsaken far-flung world on the emperor's behalf. Obi-Wan watched her, standing with his back pressed to the wall by his door or leaning against the balcony rail or sitting with his legs dangling down into space that fell down to the temple spaceport. He knew he should stop, he supposed; she'd be their empress one day and he really shouldn't have in his head, every time they met, what she looked like underneath her clothes. He should have stopped watching, but he didn't. She quite clearly didn't want him to.

And when he was away, he thought about her. He wondered what it might be like to be assigned to her personal guard and not the Sith diplomatic corps. He had the talent for fighting required to be assigned there, that much had been made clear by his background before Dooku had bought ownership of him from the arena, but he also had a brain in his head and a way with words and, when necessary, a kind of apolitical charm that made him an obvious choice for a diplomat. And, when negotiations failed, his lightsaber was just as eloquent as he was. Years of fighting with a vibroblade in each hand had helped in that respect, at least. 

But he wondered. She had a team of three guards, plus her handmaidens; only the Sith guards were Force users but he'd once seen the handmaidens use their blasters in anger and it had really been quite the display. He wondered what it might be like to spend his days close to her, to travel with her, to check her room at night before she went to bed. He wondered if she fucked them. He wondered if she'd fuck him. It was inappropriate to even think about it, but he thought about it. He didn't stop.

Now, she's their empress. 

And here he is, at her beck and call. Here he is, waiting for her.

\---

When he was young, before anyone knew he had the Force, Obi-Wan wanted to be a fighter like they saw in all the holos. His family wasn't wealthy, not like some were on his homeworld, so they didn't try to discourage him - after all, most fights in the arena weren't to the death and if you were lucky enough to find sponsorship...well, no one would worry about money again. 

So, his parents had taken him to the local trials. He passed, to nobody's surprise, and every evening after school he went to training at the ludus. He was precocious - he had his first junior match at just seven years old and his first senior at thirteen. And by the time Count Dooku, the renowned Sith Master, came to watch him fight, he'd killed seven men. Given his standing in the Empire, Dooku didn't have to pay for him; he paid, though, to show them all what Obi-Wan was worth. 

He remembers how much Dooku paid. He'd like to think his worth is valued differently these days, at least to some, at least to Empress Padmé. He's fought for everything he has. He's fought for her.

The second time she fell from her balcony, it was months later and he couldn't really call it much of a fall. He saw her there, standing at the edge of it, and she dived like a swimmer into a pool except that all there was below her was seventy storeys before the temple spaceport. He laughed. He shook his head. Then he pulled her in, much the same way as he had before: he used the Force to bring her close then took her by the hands and pulled her up onto his balcony. She was naked. She didn't seem remotely ashamed of that.

"Were you going to save yourself this time, too?" he asked her, as he stepped away. 

"I wanted to see if you'd get there first," she replied. 

"Are you pleased or disappointed?"

She smiled. "I'm not sure yet," she said, then she looked him up and down, rather like he was the one who was naked and not her. "But it's cold out here. You should lend me your robe." 

He took her at her word, extremely literally and entirely on purpose. He took off his belt and he took off his tunic and he handed it to her, leaving himself bare to the waist. He shivered. She laughed. And to get her bare feet up off the cold stone floor, she hopped up to sit on the wall with his tunic wrapped around her. He didn't want to avoid the cold, on the other hand; he leaned back against the wall and let it sink into him. It helped him to ignore the fact that her bare skin was against his clothing, drinking in the heat of him it carried with it.

"Do you remember the way back to your tower?" he asked. 

"I don't need to remember," she said. "I have you, don't I?" 

Then she tucked her legs up onto the wall and sat there cross-legged like the initiates did for temple assemblies. She probably should have looked younger like that, with her dark hair loose around her shoulders and her legs tucked up, in a too-large borrowed tunic, but she didn't. Perhaps it was the smile on her face that did it, the small, teasing quirk to her lips that told him she enjoyed this on some level that he hadn't quite worked out himself. It wasn't sex - they weren't fucking, despite all of her naked antics. He raised his eyebrows as he looked at her. Perhaps, he thought, it just wasn't sex _yet_.

When they left his room, she left his tunic behind; she threw it onto his bed and walked out naked. He didn't pick the tunic up; he went after her bare-chested. And what she'd said was clearly something very close to a lie, at the very least exaggeration, because she knew the way: she led him this time, down the corridors and stairwells, her leaps more daring than his own had ever been before. He followed, his heart racing, his heart pounding in his chest because he hadn't felt that same excitement since his last fight in the arena. She knew her limits, and somehow she knew his, too. Following her lead was exhilarating. 

At the door at the foot of her tower, they stood together, breathless, faces flushed and smiling. She laughed. He shook his head. In the midst of his mundane struggle for improvement and advancement, she was a bright, chaotic whirl of wonder. And, before she swept away and left him there, she said, "Come to the training hall tomorrow, after the initiates have finished." She raised her brows at him. "Yes?"

She didn't wait for an answer. He supposed she didn't need to, either, because the next day there he was.

He had his lightsaber ignited and was moving through his forms when the door to the training hall opened with its telltale electronic whoosh. She walked in. She shrugged off her long, black robe, and underneath she was dressed for training. They were the same thin white training clothes she'd worn on the wall before she'd begun leaving them inside, though he supposed recognising her wardrobe said nothing sensible about his state of mind. 

She drew her lightsaber from her belt, and she ignited it. The blade was the red-gold of a lava flow, like something elemental and not quite man-made, not forced the way Sith kyber crystals are, except she must have done so - perhaps she had just learned something different from the emperor, assuming that he taught her. There had seemed to be a neverending rotation of tutors over the years, sabermasters accompanying her into the halls that he'd seen only at a distance, and Obi-Wan's name had never been called. Or perhaps this was his calling, this fight she seemed to want to have. 

She moved, and as she moved, he looked more closely at the saber in her hands. The metal hilt seemed to glow with a muted hint of the same light as her blade and as she swirled it this way and that, he understood. On Naboo they call it watersteel for its usual colour, but when you forge it with the Force it loses its blue hue. It takes on a red one, like it's lit up from within, but working it takes skill and it takes power. Lady Padmé's lightsaber said a very great deal about her without her saying anything at all. Perhaps that was why she'd brought him there. Perhaps that was why Palpatine had.

When they fought, he won. He didn't pull punches because that's not how Sith train, and certainly not how they fight. He came at her with everything he had, and she paid him the same compliment. He'd watched her at her birthday games earlier that year, when she'd taken to the floor for her ceremonial fight, but she'd used the Darksaber then, as they always did. He'd seen her return to her seat afterwards, flanked by two of her guards, and he knew one of them, or at least he had a long time ago: they'd been paired in a saber exam and Obi-Wan had broken his nose with the hilt of his lightsaber. That was how Sith fought. That was how _they_ fought. Hard and fast with a clash of their blades so loud it hurt. Hard and fast with a clash of their blades so strong it jarred muscle down to bone. 

Seven men in the arena on his homeworld weren't the only ones he'd killed by then; he wondered as they fought if she'd ever taken a life herself. As empress, she would have to, but when he knocked her down, when her lip bled, when her eyes flashed hot, he believed that she could do it. More than that, as he held out his hand to help her up, he believed the Sith would do her killing for her. 

She took his hand. The watersteel hilt of her blade gleamed almost as hotly as her eyes did as she let him pull her up and then, in turn, pulled him in close. He understood; Force-forged watersteel reflects quite precisely how its wielder feels.

"One day I'm going to ask you to do something for me," she said, leaning up close by his ear. "I believe you're going to do it." 

He didn't know what she meant. But, as he watched her leave, he wasn't sure that she was wrong. 

He'd have let her win if she'd asked him to. That told him all that he needed to know.

\---

He's been waiting for her. Now, she arrives.

The dress she's wearing probably took two people half an hour to put her into. It's supple black leather sewn together in panels that leave no part of her bare from her long neck down; integral gloves cover her hands and the skirt sweeps the ground as she walks. And over it there are metal parts that shine red in the throne room's traditional torchlight, like she's wearing some fiery creature's still fiery bones. He can see her press against it as she breathes, like she's the lungs inside its unforgiving ribcage. She's the living part in this place full of dead things, and Obi-Wan believes that's apt.

When she takes her seat on the throne of the Sith, he kneels down on the ground. It's not comfortable but it's not meant to be, and he can't say he really cares because this isn't about _comfort_. It's about so very much more.

He sees there's an overlap to her skirt and she draws one section over, right to left, then the other, left to right, and underneath she's bare. She's bare from her navel to the tops of her thigh-high stockings over her knee-high boots. She throws the two sides of her dress over the throne's arms and she spreads her legs wide. She's shaved bare between them and he wonders if she does that herself, if her handmaidens do it, if she takes one of her guards into the palace baths and perches there at the edge of a bathing pool while he puts his fingers and a blade on her. He'd like to trail his fingertips over her glistening slit and bring them to his mouth. There are so many things he'd like to do for her. There are so many things he _has_ done.

"Come here, Master Kenobi," she says. 

He rises and he goes to her. She doesn't make him crawl, but he would have done. And he kneels again, between her thighs. 

"Your robe," she says, so he unbuttons it. He pushes it back and lets it drop away from his shoulders, down to the ground before the well. He's bare underneath it, except for his boots, and his cock's already hard for her. And then, from the folds of her dress, she produces something. She holds it out toward him and he understands precisely what it is. 

Maul wears one and has for as long as Obi-Wan has known him. His is black, rough, heavy, two inches high, and looks like it chafes the skin where it sits against his collarbones. This looks light. It's a slim band of a silver-white alloy, and he understands what it must be - it's the same as the hilt of her lightsaber, and the same as the bones of her dress. It's watersteel, and it's in two halves, and she leans forward to fit them together neatly around his bare neck. When she seals them with the Force, he feels it happen; watersteel takes so much strength, and she has so very much of it, in herself and in the Force. When she seals them, he feels the tip of his cock leak a bead of precome that makes its way slowly down his shaft, tickling as it goes, making him still harder. And, once it's sealed, he can see the warm red light it casts over his chest. She doesn't have to say the words for him to understand he's hers now. Maul was Palpatine's chosen, and Obi-Wan is hers.

"Can I?" he asks. His gaze flicks down between her thighs and she inclines her head, just the smallest motion, but it's one that he understands. He's spent so long watching her over the years that he knows them all by now. Her consent to his request is so thrilling to him that his cock throbs almost painfully, but he's waited so very long. 

He leans in, between her thighs, and the light of his collar makes her slick slit shine with it. He licks her there, just the tip of his tongue, then he raises his hands. They skim her thighs, they move higher, his thumbs reach her cunt and he parts her lips slowly as her fingers slide into his hair. As he tongues her, she shivers. As he strokes her with his fingertips, she gasps. He couldn't describe the way she tastes with all the pretty words he knows, from all the planets in the Empire. And his watersteel collar warms his skin. It feels how he feels. It shows that to her, and only to her.

She shudders. Her fingers tighten in his hair. And when she trembles, when she comes, she pushes him back but not away; the bones of her dress gleam so hotly that he knows precisely what she wants. He sits back on his heels and he wraps one hand around himself. He strokes as he watches her, his empress, that bright whirl of chaos in the order of his life. The steel at his throat burns bright with how he wants her, and how he wants to please her. When he comes, it's like a starburst, like a solar flare, and she laughs out loud with sheer delight.

Nine days ago, she asked him to do something for her, and Obi-Wan put his blade through Palpatine. He put her on this throne and in the well, beneath the floor, beneath the throne, his body lies with all the others. The Force preserves them. One day she'll be there, too, but for now she is his empress. 

She's chosen him above all others. 

He chose her first.


End file.
